DIBS, the increasing effect of the count, the for the Tommy John season, and more.

Welcome to the first edition of a new feature at Baseball Prospectus: Everything You Could Have Learned This Week. So much interesting baseball analysis and research comes out each week that it can be difficult to keep track of everything and pick out what's really cool, so who better than a college student working two jobs and taking 15 credit hours to walk you all through it? I've picked out a selection of pieces, ranging from complicated mathematical analyses to broad-based examinations of trends in the game, to get you caught up on the week in the sabermetric community.

As Effectively Wild listeners know, each email episode includes a statistical query that I do using Baseball-Reference's Play Index tool. Sometimes the results are easier to see than to read, like this week's, so here's a companion article about the search. The question was: Who, since 2000, has thrown the fewest pitches per start in a season?

We hope you enjoyed Kershaw day, and if you haven't, there are 13 swell articles for you still to enjoy here. Now, I've thought a lot about Clayton Kershaw fun facts in the past week, and I think I've finally settled on my favorite:

Over at Baseball America, John Manuel ran down all the No. 1 overall prospects Baseball America has ever chosen, from best (Alex Rodriguez) to worst (click over there). At the bottom of the post, he switches things up and talks about prospect no. 100:

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, except when it comes to shortstop.

There are phrases that get repeated in the BP Annual that we do our best as editors to avoid, like "at the highest level" or "advanced approach" or "command and control." Then there are the phrases that get repeated because they're so crucial to analysis that you simply can't avoid mentioning them often. Like whether the player who is manning shortstop in A-Ball is going to be able to man shortstop at the highest level in the majors. So I'd argue that this repetition is justified:

The Dodgers are better than the Phillies in almost every way. PECOTA told me this, and I told PECOTA "everybody knows that," and suddenly PECOTA and I were in a Geico commercial. When we returned, I asked PECOTA something a bit less obvious: How many teams would need to combine to be better than the Dodgers?